What can be used to replace cooking wine? Let’s find out together

Many people like to use cooking wine as seasoning when cooking, mainly because it is very effective in removing fishy smell, especially when cooking fish, adding cooking wine to season the fish will remove the fishy smell. But many times we encounter a situation where there is no cooking wine, so we have to use other things as a substitute. So what wine can be used instead of cooking wine? Let’s learn more about it.

Cooking wine is a general term for all cooking wines, mainly including rice wine, etc. Its function is to remove the fishy smell of fish and meat, increase the aroma of dishes, and help various flavors such as salty and sweet to fully penetrate into the dishes.

The use of cooking wine in my country has a history of thousands of years. Japan, the United States, and some European countries also have the habit of using cooking wine. Theoretically, beer, white wine, rice wine, wine, and whiskey can all be used as cooking wine. But after long-term practice and tasting, people found that the flavors of dishes cooked with different cooking wines are very different. After repeated experiments, people found that rice wine is the best for cooking.

Yellow wine is brewed from glutinous rice or millet. Its main ingredients include alcohol, sugar, dextrin, organic acids, amino acids, esters, aldehydes, fusel oil and extracts. Its alcohol concentration is low, less than 15%, while its ester content is high and it is rich in amino acids, so it has a strong aroma and mellow taste and is widely used in cooking dishes. The main function of rice wine in seasoning is to remove fishy smell and enhance fragrance.

So to a certain extent, we can use rice wine instead of cooking wine, and the main ingredient of cooking wine is rice wine. However, cooking wine is a condiment specially added when cooking food, and it has been improved to adapt to cooking. Therefore, it is best to use cooking wine to cook.

However, we must not use liquor or beer to replace cooking wine. Although cooking wine is made from rice wine, its seasoning effect during cooking is incomparable to other drinking alcohols such as rice wine, white wine, and beer. The cooking wine available on the market now is fundamentally different from rice wine. It is no longer purely fermented, but a flavored wine with some condiments added, so it tastes better when used in cooking.

In addition, many people use white wine or beer instead when they run out of cooking wine. In fact, the lowest alcohol concentration of liquor is around 20 degrees and the highest is around 60 degrees. Ethanol, the main ingredient in liquor, has strong permeability and volatility. If you use liquor with too high an ethanol content when cooking dishes, it will destroy the original flavor of the dishes and the taste will certainly be bad.

The alcohol concentration of beer is around 3-5 degrees, and a large part of it is carbon dioxide gas. This carbon dioxide gas is very volatile, especially when heated. Therefore, if beer is added to the dish during cooking, the alcohol will evaporate before dissolving the fishy smell, and of course it will not achieve the effect of removing the fishy smell and greasiness.